AITA: I Want to Leave My Dying Boyfriend

Her boyfriend is dying… What should she do? When you’re faced with the possibility of joining the Hot Young Widows Club, you get slammed with a million questions. And for this listener, the question was: Can I leave him even though he’s going to die? Today, Nora is joined by fellow Hot Young Widow, Tracy Koski, to get into all of it.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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Hi, hi, hi there, hi, hi.

Hey, Nora.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you. Hi, I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you.

Now, everything happens to other people until it happens to you. And when it happens to you and you become other people, you don’t get any special orientation or guidebook.

You just get a big and usually very traumatic life change that you didn’t ask for and wouldn’t choose from a menu and likely wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. We live, quite tragically, at the speed of life. We know what we know when we know it.

We learn by doing and we learn by living and we learn on each other and we learn on ourselves. We are the lab rats and we are the scientists.

And I say all of this because when you are on the outside of something that you haven’t experienced or when you are on the other side of something, your perspective is different.

I said different, not better, because even perspective is a matter of perspective. We bring our own lenses to every situation. We bring our own experiences to every situation.

When you are in it, you are looking up, down, around, hoping that there is someone out there who gets it, who can flip on a light in the darkness and help you find your way through.

And when you have gone through it, you can be that light for someone.

So today we have a message from someone who is in the darkness, a woman whose boyfriend has received a very, very serious diagnosis, a woman who is on the cusp of joining the Hot Young Widows Club and sent out an SOS to us via email.

3:08
Listener’s Dilemma

And joining me today, I have a fellow Hot Young Widow, one of the first widows that I met actually, who is going to help me shine a little light.

Tracy Koski became a widow just months before I did, in February 2014, when her husband, Paul, died from brain cancer. She is now a grief counselor, and she is here as a widow. She is here as a friend of mine.

She is here as a mental health professional. But I have an ask for you before you listen or watch, if you are on our YouTube, which, thank you, turn your heart to its softest mode. That’s what I would like you to do.

I, myself, had to do that because this message, because this message really hit something inside of me. It also arrived on my dead husband’s birthday, and my first reaction was not soft. So, all that said, let’s get into it and let’s hear this email.

Hi, Nora. I’m writing to you with my emotional support bottle of wine in hand. Nutshell, I’m 33.

The love of my life received a terminal diagnosis a few months ago. Doctors give three-ish years, nice and arbitrary.

With a helping hand from fate, I found your writing, and it has been a wonderful salve for the gaping wound that is my impending future.

I’ve since devoured all of your books and thought, why not write to the patron saint of sad, death-adjacent women herself? Thank you, by the way. I would love to be the patron saint of sad, death-adjacent women.

So Nora, what the hell do I do? I love this man very much, and I want to be by his side until the very end. He’s my person, but I’m also really scared about putting my life on hold for my, lack of a better word, best childbearing years.

And that fear makes me feel like the worst person in the world. I want a marriage and a family more than anything, and there is a part of me that wants to take the first exit ramp and get started on my future and my needs. But I can’t.

I don’t want to. But I can’t. I don’t want to leave this amazing man who I finally found.

He needs me, but I can’t help but be torn between being selfish and selfless. Again, saying this aloud makes me feel like the devil herself.

He has sort of brought up giving me a baby, but I know he would be doing it just for me, and given how he’s coping at the moment, I think that a new child would be far too stressful for him.

But that’s a whole other Pandora’s box of pros and cons that I don’t have the emotional capacity to deal with right now. He’s also completely isolated himself, thinking that he can process and handle it all alone.

He’s so depressed, he doesn’t want to talk about anything. He just wants to sit in front of the TV and cuddle. And I want him to talk to someone, whether that’s me, a therapist, a priest, a hobo on a park bench, I don’t care.

He needs help, but he just refuses. I’m trying to give him all the patients that I can and all the grace to work through it on his own time, but I need to talk about it.

When I ask about how the doctor went or how he’s feeling, he says, let’s talk about it another time. Safe to say, I’m still waiting. Well, I know this isn’t about my needs.

It kind of is. I’m on this journey too, again, to be selfish or to be selfless. The worst part for me, well, that changes on a daily basis, is that there’s no hope.

I live on hope. I’m an eternal optimist who’s now finding it incredibly hard to live in the no light at the end of the tunnel dark. I’ve since replaced hope with a nice Merlot, seems to be doing the trick.

To add to the fun, I lost my dad two years ago and I felt like I just got out of that grief. I really don’t want to do it all again. I roll emoji.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot of me in your emails over the coming years. Thank you, future Hot Young Widow.

I’m going to admit that I had a very strong reaction to this email the first few times that I read it and that reaction had everything to do with my own experiences and my own biases.

8:02
Nora’s Personal Journey

My experience was this. I met Aaron in 2010. I fell in love like Wiley Coyote falls off of clips, and then we found out a year later that he had stage 4 brain cancer.

I remember being in this liminal space just before we found out when he was in the hospital but they hadn’t figured out what was wrong with him yet, and knowing that whatever happened, I was going to be there, that there was nothing that I could hear

that could move me from the side of his bed or from his life. Honestly, whether he liked it or not.

And the night that we found out that what was wrong with him was a brain tumor, well, we laid in that hospital bed with just the light from the heart monitor.

I told Aaron that we were going to get married as soon as he got out of the hospital, and he said something like, you can’t marry me, I’m going to die. And I said something like, shut up, we’re getting married. Really romantic, romantic stuff.

I had no real experience with cancer. My relationship record was spotty, shall we say, but I knew, I knew that there was not another path for me to take, but this one.

I also knew that I would not get what I wanted, at least not the way that I wanted it. Erin and I had talked about marriage and children on our second date.

We had talked about a very long life together, but the life expectancy with stage 4 glioblastoma is three to five years.

I Googled it once, I put that out of my mind, and I made the choice to be present in what existed right then, which was this big, beautiful love, this person that I had waited my whole life to meet, and cancer only when we really needed to pay

attention to it. I kept Erin and our love in the front seat, like one of those 80s cars with a bench seat in the front, which we should bring back. We put cancer in the trunk, and we lived our lives. We were driving.

And that was a conversation that we had. That was several conversations, but not a ton of conversations, but it was, what do you want to do? You want to keep working?

Okay, you want to spend time with your friends? Great. You want to be a person, not a cancer person?

Awesome. I will get you whatever you want within the parameters of reality. So we banked his sperm, knowing radiation and chemo would not be good for conception.

It’s important to note that not one single doctor told us to do that, and they seemed surprised that we wanted to, but that’s because they had cancer in the front seat.

We had it in the trunk and we were driving, and we drove to the sperm bank so Aaron could jerk off at 7 a.m. God bless him. We got married a month after Aaron’s brain surgery.

We had a baby 13 months later when Aaron was recovering from his second brain surgery, and Aaron did several rounds of chemo, several rounds of radiation in the three years that he lived with brain cancer, and we worked full-time, and we went to

shows and brunch, and we really lived life. And I can say that I’m lucky because I did that with Aaron. And Aaron was not depressed. I would have been.

Aaron did not shut me out. Aaron did not isolate himself. Aaron was himself up until the end, and that person was buoyant enough to keep me afloat mentally.

But you are right that this is about you too.

11:55
Redefining Life’s Path

This is about you.

I did not know that any of it had anything to do with me.

I was focused on, Aaron was focused on her child, was focused on giving what I could, doing what I could. And I never thought, I mean, I don’t mean that in like a selfish way. I kind of mean it in a foolish way.

I didn’t think about myself. I never went to therapy. When someone suggested it to me, my cousin Lillian, sorry, Lil, you were right.

And I said, yeah, okay, sure. I bet that would help someone. Not me, I’m fine, okay?

But you’re asking me a few different things here. And one is, are you a bad person for not wanting to put your life on hold? And my answer is, you are not a bad person for being afraid of something scary.

This is really, really scary. I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you this, which is that there is no such thing as putting your life on hold. This is your life.

Your life is that you fell in love, and now he’s really sick, and he’s probably going to die, and it doesn’t feel like you are in it together.

Your life is that if you stay with him, you will not have the family that you imagined having, one where the dad is alive and you grow old together. Or at least you won’t have that with him.

Your life is that if you leave him, you’ll be walking away from what you believe is the love of your life, and people will think you’re a bad person.

You didn’t say that, but I’m saying it because I’m reading what’s between the lines, and I know how people judge women. This experience is not an interruption to your life. This experience is not a pause of your life.

This experience is your life, a part of your life, the same way meeting him is a part of your life, the same way falling in love and being in love with him is a part of your life.

It is a part of your story that will never disappear no matter what choice you make.

I think that when we have been in pursuit of love, we think that finding it offers us the safety and the certainty we have been looking for, especially when we say the love of my life.

What could sound more final and safe than the love of your life, but there is literally no guarantee of safety and certainty, not ever.

And we as people have to put that out of our minds, because to live with the knowledge that there is no safety or certainty at the forefront would be so frightening that we would never get out of bed in the morning.

But the truth is, that stuff happens, and then it keeps happening. The stuff that happens is what makes up a life, even when the stuff that is happening is terrible and frightening and cannot be controlled.

Your dad died, and you don’t want to do grief again. Baby, I’m sorry to tell you this, too bad. Too bad, buddy.

You’re doing it again. You’re doing it again and again. You’re doing it now.

You will do it even if you leave this man. You will do it repeatedly throughout your life because everyone you love will die. Everyone.

And yes, there is an exit ramp from this relationship, but there’s not an exit ramp from what is happening. This is going to stay with you.

And there is no guarantee, and there is no guarantee that if you leave today, you put yourself back on the dating scene, you will find the love that will give you the family that you want to build on the timeline that you want.

There is no guarantee that that will happen. So you can take that exit ramp, but there are not perfect alternate lives that are waiting for you on the side of the road with like their thumbs up.

Maybe there’s a healthy husband and like 2.5 kids down the road, or maybe there’s a healthy husband who divorces you because he fell in love with his physical therapist and refuses to pay child support for the children that you had together.

Maybe there is, maybe there’s no husband and a child we don’t know. We don’t trade one life in for another like they’re genes that don’t fit properly. It is more like you are bidding on a storage unit.

You’re on storage wars, okay? You don’t know what’s in there until you get in there and you open all those boxes. These are all horrible metaphors and I’m sorry.

It is normal, I think, to think about the path not taken or the path that we could take. And I didn’t think it myself, but I know that it’s normal to think about leaving when someone is sick because people do it all the time.

Mostly, statistically, that’s men. Men do it, okay? They do it and men are people.

And again, I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you that the choice is not between selflessness and selfishness. There are real costs associated with staying and with being a caregiver. It does take time.

It takes money. You have to talk about the hard things. You have to talk about end-of-life care, power of attorney, medical power of attorney, money, money, and all of that now, early.

You will have to have flexibility with your job. You’ll have to plan for the worst and hope for the best.

It’s staying on those parallel tracks is kind of the only way through because you will see and do things that you didn’t think that you could see or could do, but you will do it because that is what love is.

To be the love of someone’s life is an honor, it’s a treasure, and it’s a responsibility. I hope this doesn’t come across as harsh because they don’t mean it that way, but I think that these are the moments that prove the depth of our love.

I did not doubt that I would stay with Aaron, even when his mom asked, are you sure? You’re so young and this is going to be so hard.

I remember thinking, whatever I do, I will someday have to live without him, so I am going to live with him as long as I can. Caregiving is not an easy thing to do, but it is a holy thing to do.

I don’t think anyone has ever said it better than Dorinda Medley. Again, I can’t tell you what to do, but you do need help. You, both of you, both of you, but especially you because you’re the only one who reached out to me.

You are both grieving the lives that you thought you would have together, but you’re grieving different things. He’s the one who’s dying, and you’re the one who loves him.

These are both big experiences, they’re real experiences, but they’re different experiences. The five stages of grief from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross get a lot of flak, but they are a reflection of what she witnessed in the dying. The dying.

Experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They might not go through it in that order, but he’s going to go through them.

You can’t force anyone else to go to therapy or do the things you want them to do, but you can force yourself.

I wish I would have.

You’re going to go through your own thing. You’re going through your own thing right now. You need to have your own support system in place.

You’d need mental health support. You need to stop drinking. I’m not accusing you of having a drinking problem, but because staying present with your feelings is going to be important, and numbing is not going to help you out in any way.

I am so glad that I was 100% sober through Aaron’s sickness, and I do wish I would have stayed sober after he died instead of getting blackout drunk at his funeral, but that is a story for another time.

I am a person who tends to turn toward a hard thing and a hard conversation. And again, Aaron and I had those early. I think you have to have them too.

If you want to know what the doctor said, go to the doctor’s appointments. If you want to have a baby and he’s offering you one, but you think he’s only doing it for you, talk about it. Ask him.

Ask him. I think that was giving me a child, trying to give me two children was the kindest thing that Erin did for me and also the bravest. And I’m not going to tell you that it is easy or simple, but nothing in life really ever is.

I think that you are having a normal reaction to a traumatic event. I think that you want an answer to a test. I think that you want an answer key to a test that can’t be cheated on.

I think you want me to tell you that it will be okay if you go and that it will be okay if you stay. And I hate that you feel without hope, but I also get it. I get it.

You aren’t going to get what you want, and you don’t want to hope for the impossible, but in my experience, there’s something that is much more powerful than hope, and that is presence.

It is being in the moment that you are in, even when that moment is very scary and hard. It’s not skipping down your mental pathway to an unknowable and unpredictable future. You aren’t going to get what you want, but you do still have what you have.

The love of your life is not dead yet. He’s on the couch, and he wants to cuddle, so go sit with him.

All right, that’s just One Widow’s perspective, and now we’re going to speak with Tracy Koski.

Tracy, I want to hear about when you became a caregiver. Can you tell me about Paul’s diagnosis, where you were in your relationship? You know, take me back to Traumatown, baby.

Woo, one-way ticket.

So Paul was diagnosed in 2012. We were at 4th of July at my parents’ and we were doing secrets. We always did secret shots of tequila when we were around my parents, because my parents were prickly and it was just hard to be there.

So we went out on a pontoon ride, and Paul was holding our son who was 2 1⁄2 at the time. And he kind of looked at me and pushed him forward and said, you need to take him for a second.

And he leaned off the end of the boat and he started throwing up. And what followed after was like a series of headaches. So we ended up leaving, and he was like, we can’t do secret shots of tequila anymore.

I don’t know what happened. It was just hot outside and all of a sudden I was sick. And then these crippling headaches came over him.

So we ended up leaving. We went to urgent care and they were like, you have whiplash. Like from what?

The pontoon was, it was going so fast.

And Nora, my dad, my dad was the like, we’re driving around the perimeter of the lake, checking out the properties at five miles an hour.

No wake zone. We’re not even catching a breeze. One morning I woke up and he wasn’t in bed and I went downstairs and I asked him if he’d been up all night and he said he didn’t know.

And so I got in the shower. I don’t know why. I had to take a shower real quick.

Yeah.

Why do we do anything?

I’m going to take our son to daycare. So I took a shower, I got out, I’m like, I’m going to take our son to daycare. And when I come back, we’re going to the emergency room.

And when we got there and kind of explained what was going on, they did a CT scan, they found a mass, and it was immediate emergency.

Yeah.

And at that point, this is so much information, but I remember going back home feeling like, this is just, it’s fine, they’re just gonna, they’re gonna take care of him.

It’s gonna take a little bit, and somebody at my work had had a brain tumor and it was benign. It’s just like, oh, this happens, it’s okay. So my mother-in-law was with me at the time, and we’re like, let’s go home and have lunch.

And when we got home, within seconds of being home, they called us. They’re like, you need to come back.

I had to sign papers immediately for him to have an emergency, a hole drilled in his head because the swelling was so bad that they had to relieve it. So a few days later, he had surgery. He was put into a medically induced coma.

A few days later, he had surgery. Our first craniotomy. And that’s like when the diagnosis came.

Yeah, so both of us are specifically glioblastoma widows.

We both know that specific beast, and it’s not a good diagnosis. And, you know, the life expectancy has not really changed, nor has the treatment changed much since like the 1970s when they started changing it.

It’s very brutal.

And I wanted to talk to you about this email for a few reasons. One is that you really did it. I’m going to cry now, but like you were like that light in the darkness for me because you were a widow first.

You know what I mean? Like you did it first. And I was like, okay, she’s still here.

I can do this. Like I will have to do this someday, but I can see her do it. I’ll always remember Paul’s funeral.

I’ll always remember your eulogy. Right? Like we can hold that ceiling up.

And you know the realities of caregiving. You know what it means to walk someone to the end. And your grief trajectory completely changed your life.

And now, you have an entirely different career that I also want you to tell us about. Yeah.

So since then, about a year after Paul died, I became a peer mentor for other brain cancer, specifically caregivers. It was something that was important to Paul.

We had gone to a volunteer network thing, and they had free pizza, and he’s like, let’s go, free pizza and brain tumors.

Get a brain tumor, get a free slice of pizza.

Right? It was good pizza too.

So we had been there, and the American Brain Tumor Association had started this sort of peer mentorship program, and it was actually based on our relationship because I had brought up over pizza that we need people to talk to, that get it and can

understand. So I became a peer mentor. I decided to go back to school and get my master’s in counseling and psychological services. So I work now for a corporate clinic.

I’m a pre-licensed counselor, so working towards my licensure in the state of Minnesota. And I work with grief, I work with trauma, I work with ADHD, depression, anxiety, all of those things. And it’s become incredibly meaningful.

It was my, I guess, like, growth after tragedy.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s really beautiful.

And I wanted to hear for all of those reasons, because, you know, it’s very disorienting. It’s very disorienting to be with somebody whose life you know for a fact is gonna be shorter than yours.

You know, you don’t, you start a relationship, a marriage, anything, thinking like we’re going through it together and like hopefully we’ll die at the same time holding hands in our sleep. And that very rarely happens.

And when your life changes, it is not in the way that you asked it to happen. And it’s never in a way that feels like completely manageable to you.

Somebody hands you a baby and says, I got to throw up off the side of this pontoon boat on the 4th of July. And maybe it’s the tequila. And maybe it’s the fact that I have a brain tumor.

So I had one more question. Oh, yes. So what was your first reaction to this email as a caregiver turned widow?

My first reaction was anger, not anger.

Frustration with society, that caregiving somehow means sacrificing your entire self and carrying everything. It’s like, we’re not giving care. We’re like, we have to bleed care everywhere.

And that’s what I kind of felt from the email when I first read it.

Yeah, my caregiving experience, I think, was, it might have been anomalous, you know, but I, and I might have just been so in it that I couldn’t feel it.

Like, I couldn’t feel the enormity of it because there was just so much, so I think my first reaction, which was like, oh my god, like, what? What are you talking about? Which was honestly my first reaction.

Like, what, if this is the love of your life, you just do it, right?

Was my reacting to her taking a pause and like looking at the entirety of her life, looking at how big this task is, which I either didn’t have the time to do or did not make the time to do, but I also was giving care to a person who was not

depressed. And I would not, Aaron was a buoyant, happy, good person. If I were diagnosed with brain cancer or anything terminal, Tracy, trust me, I would be horrible. I’d be insufferable.

I would not suffer quietly. I would not be, I wouldn’t die with dignity. I’ll tell you that much.

I would, I just wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t. And so I do think he made it easy, easier on me for that reason.

And also the fact that, you know, brain tumors can do a lot of different things to your personality. Illness can do a lot of things to your personality. And he didn’t experience that, which meant I didn’t experience it.

He was always himself. And, you know, I’ve known people who gave care to people who suffered from, you know, dementia or whose brain tumors ran a part of their brain that completely altered their personality.

And I, she is experiencing a kind of loneliness that I didn’t have to experience because Erin was right there next to me, and we were truly in it together.

Mm-hmm.

And people cope with things in different ways.

Mm.

And his coping strategy is different than her coping strategy.

Yeah.

I experienced the same thing. Paul didn’t want to talk to me about it, and he was still willing to, like, volunteered to go get therapy. I wasn’t even in therapy at that time.

No.

I don’t have time for that.

No.

When would I go?

He went to therapy, and he brought his, like, existential mortality, his fear, and all of that to a therapist.

Mm-hmm.

He didn’t, he looked, again, like, we were in it together.

Yeah.

And he wasn’t gonna put extra pressure on me to figure out how he was gonna emotionally prepare for this.

Yeah.

He took responsibility for that on his own. And so I, I didn’t have to carry any emotional weight. And I don’t think anybody should have to carry all of the emotional weight.

Yeah.

It’s like it’s heavy.

It is heavy.

Yeah. It’s heavy. It’s heavy.

Yeah. I think it’s interesting to me because you mentioned, like, it makes you angry for just, like, the way that caregiving is treated in American culture, which is that, you know, the cost lies with the caregiver, the cost lies with the patient.

There is real, no real, like, social safety net for being sick in America. And whatever flimsy social safety net was there is definitely just being frayed more and more each day. So these are not, you know, baseless concerns.

And also, I did not for myself experience the loss. I didn’t take it as a loss. I didn’t feel it as a loss myself.

And what struck me in this is that twice she says that the choice is between selfishness or selflessness. And I didn’t feel that. And I don’t know that that’s a true binary.

I don’t think that the expectation should be that you light yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm. And that wasn’t my reality either, even though it was a lot, you know?

Right, right. It, I, you brought up a dialectic of selflessness or self-ish-ness. And it’s, there’s so much in between.

There’s love. There’s compassion. There’s empathy for each other.

There’s shared grief. There’s shared sad. Like, there’s, it’s not one or the other.

Yeah.

And we have to kind of hold two things at the same time.

Multiple things at the same time.

You’re so lucky if you’re holding two things at the same time.

I had two hands. I can manage it.

Doesn’t, no big deal. Women, this is how we get out of the car.

Okay.

This is, this is a, this is actual representation of, okay.

That’s me going into work every day.

Yeah. Every day. Yeah.

We can, we can, we know we can carry more than one thing at once. And, you know, the, the message, it, to me, it tasted like loneliness and isolation. And also something, you know, again, we’re talking about like these sort of like extremes.

It’s one thing or the other, but something that jumped out on me or jumped out at me and initially like felt very like oof, to me, was the idea of putting your life on hold for somebody.

The idea that you are putting your life on hold when you are taking care of somebody that you love and that you think is like, you know, like the love of your life. Like, I don’t personally consider that my life being on hold.

Like, that is, I think, top five, top three, top two most meaningful parts of my life to date.

Yeah, I remember talking with you about like a series of moments. Life is a series of moments. And we put this in Paul’s program, because you proofread it for me.

I was like, she’s so good with words. Nora, help me with my eulogy and my husband’s, like, the program thing that I have to write. Oh, it was too much.

It’s a series of moments. And this is a big one. But it’s not the only one.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s something when you get a terminal, when your partner gets a terminal diagnosis and you’re making the choice to walk along the side them, you’re kind of, like, making a choice to get out of the driver’s seat of your own life for a little

while. Like, you are not in control anymore. The illness is now in control. And what do you do with that?

What do you do with that lack of control?

Yeah. That’s so interesting that you said that, because Erin got this diagnosis, and we kind of, like, put it in the trunk and locked the trunk.

You know, like, aside from the times where he had to take chemo, had to go to radiation, or he was having a seizure, I was like, sorry, we’re just regular people.

You know, the way that you read my blog, and you’re like, oh, god, I don’t, I can’t do this, right? Like, we, and I don’t think this was a good choice that we made, but we didn’t go to any support groups, right?

We didn’t go to any of that kind of stuff, because we’re like, no, no, no, we want to just be us, and cancer can come along. But, like, we can’t be cancer people, because we’re not cancer people, right?

Like, we were so almost, like, defensive over, like, the normalcy of our lives. And I don’t know if that was, you know, pure delusion, but it’s almost like, you are correct. You’re not in control, right?

I believed that I was in the driver’s seat. Like, I believed we could, like, kind of control what we could control. Like, oh, we’re still going to get married.

We’re still going to have a baby. We’re still going to go on, like, a honeymoon. We’re still going to, you know, spend our money going to shows.

And, you know, buying Nikes and things like that. But that’s because, like, big picture, like, there is a giant clock above us ticking down, and we don’t know, like, when the bomb is actually going to go off. And I, yeah, I don’t know.

Honestly, Tracy, here’s why this was hard for me, because I never, ever, ever thought about anything except, like, okay, like, what’s next? What do we do next? And so I never thought, I never thought there was an exit ramp ever.

It just didn’t cross my mind. And I feel for the woman writing this because I know what she’s afraid of is that she’s a bad person. And I don’t think she’s a bad person.

I think she’s being appropriately afraid of a scary thing.

And I think she’s a woman that’s in touch with her needs. And she’s a woman who’s already grieving the life that she thought she would have. So he start, everything started in July.

We had had the conversation, our son was two and a half about building our family and moving out of North Minneapolis to the suburbs for schooling for our kids and building our family.

And we went to get a second opinion with a neuro-oncologist at Mayo, and I asked him about freezing sperm. Because this was on my mind, right? Like, I’m not supposed to be here.

I’m supposed to be getting pregnant.

Yeah.

So, and this man looked at me and a doctor looked at me and said, well, it depends. Do you want to be a single mom to two kids?

Or one?

And that was the most honest answer. I was mad. Like, no, like, help me keep hope.

Like, let me continue to live the delusion that I’m going to live the life that I had planned. And in what, like, real quick. Yeah.

No, you’re going to be a single mom. You already are going to be a single mom. You’re going to have one or you’re going to have two.

And I was like, I don’t want to be a single mom to two kids. And that became my reality.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So we have to let go of, we let go of what, when we make a choice to be a caregiver, we let go of the control or the future that we thought we had. And we give ourself space to grieve that.

Yeah. She said she doesn’t want to grieve again because her dad died two years ago and she just got through it. And it’s like, this is grief.

Like, you’re experiencing it now. And I remember someone saying that to me when Erin was sick, and I was like, no, you’re wrong and never say that to me again. I was so offended.

I really was. I was like, don’t say that. No, I’m not.

No, I’m not, because he’s here right now. You know, so no, I’m not grieving. But of course, I was.

And we did not get, you know, the version of life that we thought we would. And I don’t know that it was ever in our control anyways. You know, I, like, who’s to say?

Like, what would have happened without, you know, this terminal diagnosis? But, like, there’s just no guarantees and no control in life ever. You know?

Like, ever. Like, even if she stays with this guy, even if she had decided, even if she had married this guy, there was no diagnosis. There is no guarantee that you will have the thing that you want when you want it.

And there’s a difference between that and knowing you’re not going to get it. Like, just knowing. Just knowing you’re not.

And she mentioned she has no hope and that she runs on hope.

And I…

Like, I want to hear your take on that. You know, I want to hear you talk about, like, what do we do when we don’t have hope for the life that we thought we would have? What keeps us going?

For me, it was just like, okay, well, we’re here. Let’s do it. Like, you know, her main question is, what do I do?

Right?

Yeah, we don’t tell anybody. No one can tell you what to do.

I don’t know what you do, right? But it’s like, scared about putting my life on hold for my childbearing years. This is what I want.

I want it with him. He’s the love of my life, but do I want to do this? Like, to me, the underlying question is, am I a bad person?

And the final question to me is, okay, but I don’t have help. Like, what, how do I get through this if I don’t have help?

Ah.

So we find, I think we find hope in every day. I think I held on to hope and maybe it was naivete. Fine.

Fine. And that’s just how my brain operates. Like, oh, I’m not going to worry about it until it happens.

And I think that’s how Paul and I both operated. And it made for it. I mean, there was anxiety that bubbled up, but for the most part, in between chemo and in between all of the things that we were dealing with, we just were.

Mm-hmm.

I don’t know how else to…

And that’s where the hope came from. It was like little moments of gratitude in our family every day, and grateful for the minute.

Of course, there was pain, and there were moments I was sitting across from the dining room table and sitting across and looking at an empty chair because he was too sick to come to dinner, and my child is in the height chair.

And I was grateful that he was upstairs and sleeping.

Yeah.

It’s hope doesn’t die with the person.

How?

Yeah. It’s like, I… Hope is such a strange thing to me.

I don’t know. It’s like, I don’t really know… I guess I couldn’t have identified, like, when do you lose it?

When do you have it? Like, you know, it feels like a little bit slippery to me, because it’s sort of a fixation on a future that is always out of our control, in a way.

And yet, I do think that I operated in that same kind of delusion, too, where, okay, well, the statistics say three to five years, but, you know, there’s outliers all the time.

So, until, again, until brain cancer kicks its way out of the trunk, where we have hogtied it, and he has a seizure, or he has to go get his blood drawn, or something else, like, it’s just not there. Like, and I don’t know if that was healthy.

I don’t know if that amount of, you know, compartmentalization was good, but it definitely made things not just bearable. But we did have, I had a lot of joy.

And I think that I’ve described those years before Tracy as, like, probably the happiest of my life, because I was so grateful for every small thing that wasn’t horrible, and because we were so present with each other.

Like, even if where we were was the hospital on Valentine’s Day. Like, it just felt like everything was heightened. And I’m sad for this writer, because I don’t think that is, that is, she’s not feeling that.

And I guess crisis clarifies in my experience. And so either, like, I have felt like, oh, God, I know exactly what I’m going to do, or I felt like I don’t know what to do, so I’ll sit here until I figure it out.

But, like, I just, I don’t know that I’ve felt, but in, like, the, you know, in the situation that I was in with Erin, I did not feel, I didn’t feel this. I didn’t feel this.

And I didn’t either.

There’s a concept I was thinking about called Ring Theory.

And it’s heavy, yeah, where the person is in the middle, and then the spouse is on the next outer circle, spouse children, and then we keep going outer and outer, and it’s comfort comes in and dump out. That’s what it is. It’s comfort in, dump out.

Yeah, yes.

And so you figure out how to kind of obtain that for yourself when you’re in this caregiving role, like, where do I go?

And it appears to me that this woman could benefit from writing.

Yeah, writing and this is my- That was my big recommendation, Tracy. This is like where we bring it on home.

It’s like, you got to have somebody. You got to have somebody who gets it. You got to have somebody who gets it.

And it doesn’t have to be the best friend that you had from growing up, whose partner is not going to die in three years. It doesn’t have to be, you know, your coworker whose husband doesn’t have a brain tumor.

It could be a friend of a friend who emails you because she heard that you’re going through the same thing and you go have breakfast and then you text each other and you can call each other and cry and say whatever crazy thing that you need to say,

but like you do have to have somebody. You got to have somebody.

A place to dump out.

A place to dump out.

That’s really gross. Sorry.

I know. We got to put that there’s like a graphic for it too. That’s what it says.

It says like comfort in, dump out. You know what? It’s true because how many times do people come and try to dump on Paul in front of you and you’re like, no, it’s not happening.

You can’t do that. We have like this instinctual sort of like, you know, you can’t do it. But there’s just something about like that, that selfishness versus selflessness.

It’s like, you know, she keeps saying like, do I leave? Do I stay? Do I give up all my childbearing years for this person?

And like pause my life? Am I the devil for even thinking this? And like, it just feels like a lot of all or nothing, which I also understand because, you know, the stakes are so high.

The stakes are so high. And I don’t know. I also feel, Tracy, like to me, to love somebody, and now I’m going to cry, to love somebody is an honor.

It’s also a responsibility. Like, we do have a responsibility to the people that we love. And if we say, if I tell somebody, like, you are the love of my life, I don’t know what else I would do with my life, but love you till the end of yours.

You know, I think honestly, that’s where I had a hard time reading this. Like, is, if I were the person who had three years to live, I think my greatest fear would be like, I’m not worth that three years of someone’s life, you know?

Like, I’m not saying that’s not a high price to pay, but like, I would, that would be a hard, that would be a hard, hard thing for me to know.

Like, ugh.

It’s holding two truths at the same time.

Yeah.

I love this person, I want to walk them through to the end, and that means my life is changing.

Yeah.

The baby thing, I, we didn’t talk to a doctor about the baby. I was gonna, you know, I don’t think it’s recommended. I don’t think it’s recommended, and I understand why, right?

Like having a baby is a huge thing. It’s a huge thing. It’s a huge thing.

Oh, don’t add another baby.

Like, you just…

Don’t add another thing that you have to care about.

And yet I did it.

I did it, and I tried to do it twice.

I know.

Like, and I don’t know.

I don’t know what that is. I just was like, whatever it is, I can do it. Whatever it is, I can do it.

I don’t know if I, if I could have done it. Like, to me, I’m like, you guys have to talk to each other. You guys have to have a conversation.

Like, you can’t have a conversation. You have to have a conversation. Am I going to the doctor with you?

Am I, if you’re not married, like, what, what, you don’t have a right to be in the room if his family shows up and they don’t want you there. Like, you know, like, you have, you have, like, you have to have these conversations.

Like, you have to be able to have uncomfortable conversations. And if you want to call somebody the love of your life, you better be able, this goes for anybody, not just this caller, right?

Like, if you want to call somebody the love of your life, you have to be able to have every conversation under the sun with them. Like, you have to be able to say, to say all of the hard things.

And like, this is, like, this is not just something that you can kind of, like, wing your way through, because there are also, like, medical and legal loophole, or medical and legal issues that you will have to confront.

Yes.

So, you have to have those conversations, like, and doesn’t mean that you have to be the receptacle for all of his feelings, or that you’re the person to do that, but, like, you got to know. You got to know, like, what’s the plan?

And it’s been a few months. You have to have a plan. You have to know what the plan is.

If you’re going to the doctor’s appointment, what happened at the doctor’s appointment? What happens if he can no longer speak? What happens if he’s, like, incapacitated in another serious way?

Like, you either have these conversations now or you have them never, and it will be worse to not have them.

Hmm.

How’d you have those conversations with Paul? He was just amenable to, like, did you, do you remember? I just remember looking at Erin, because guess what?

Another brain tumor person who walked that road before me said, go to a lawyer right now. Go to a lawyer right now, make a will, make a healthcare directive, get medical power of attorney, and we did it for each other.

I was like, I’ll do it for me too, you can be mine just in case, right? Like, having a third person there took a lot of the heat off of it, right? Like, there’s a lawyer here.

She’s, and she’s going to ask us all these questions, we’re going to have them in a controlled environment, and yeah, I’m going to cry a little bit, but also like at the end, we did it, okay?

It was maybe an hour of our lives, and now we have tied things up, and we don’t have to worry about those specific things. Something new will happen, right? But I can be like, yes, I have this legal piece of paper and that matters.

Like those things do matter.

We did many of those things the night before Paul’s second surgery, like called our neighbors and asked them to come over and be witnesses while we were filling it out, because we hadn’t thought about it until that point.

Like it wasn’t real until the tumor came back. Yeah. It was like we thought we were actively fighting it, and we were for an entire year.

Yeah.

Then knock, knock, I’m back.

It’s me, the tumor. Then we were like, oh, we got to figure these. We were younger, too.

I was, this was 11 years ago.

We didn’t know.

Nobody prepares you for this.

No.

I didn’t know. I didn’t have a will.

I was like, for what? Like my $78 in my savings account that just goes back and forth between my checking? Yeah.

Who wants my pez collection?

I don’t know.

Okay.

Yeah.

Who wants all of my plastic clothing from Forever 21? I got to have a plan for this. Got to have a plan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we didn’t know.

Yeah.

So we didn’t really have a plan until the second surgery came around and then the next time we talked about it was when he went into hospice.

Yeah.

Doctor’s appointments were doctor’s appointments, MRIs were MRIs, blood draws were blood draws, and we just, family Christmas was family Christmas. We went to Texas to visit his parents. We did everything that we wanted to do until we couldn’t.

Yeah.

So I wanted to say one thing, because you brought up a point that I forgot, that they’re not married.

And she has zero legal rights.

Mm-hmm.

So I did actually think about this. This is terrible.

Yeah.

If she’s going to sign up to do this, and she already has, the conversation is, am I the beneficiary on your life insurance?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

That is the conversation. Because I’m the one that is now going to be left with everything to figure out. A home that I maybe can’t afford on a single income, or two cars, right?

Now I have to get rid of a car, and so she’s going to be the one.

And can I sell a car that I don’t own? No, you can’t.

No, you have to change the title.

Unless you have, yeah, unless those things belong to you when he dies. So that is a great point. That is a great point.

You have to be the beneficiary. You have to make sure that you are, that you know what the laws are, where you live, and what those considerations are.

It’s too late for him to get life insurance now, but I’m assuming he has a small policy through his work, at least. And you need to make sure that you know what all these things are. You know the financial situation.

Also, you’re not married. Do you know his financial situation? And these are conversations, by the way, that I would have whether or not somebody was ill.

Like, before committing to them.

100.

Before committing to them. You have to know those kinds of things. I knew, I knew when I proposed to Erin that we were both broke.

Like, I knew that, I knew that. I was like, I’m gonna deal with one of this house. Okay, okay.

All right, and what’s the rate? All right, I don’t own a house, but here I am judging you. All that kind of stuff.

Like, you do, you have to have these conversations. In it, I wish, I wish, this is, we’re gonna dig into that, Tracy. I wish people talked about that more.

I wish people talked to women about that more. But like, there is a cost to being in any committed relationship. And you need to know what the laws are where you live and what you need to have.

Brilliant.

That was, that was… right there.

Right there. Life insurance, what else?

That’s why they barely pay me a minimum wage.

Yeah.

That’s it, baby. That’s it.

But you don’t want to get paid because you’re helping people. Okay, that’s, don’t you want to help people?

That’s it. Yes. That’s what, that’s how I’ve always felt, too.

I’m like, no, it’s fine.

It’s fine. It’s fine. What’s the last thing, what’s the last thing we want to say to this lady?

To know what she’s signing up for.

And to figure out where her supports are. Because if your partner is not going to be your support, which he can’t, maybe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We have to figure out how we take care of ourselves.

Yeah.

And it doesn’t mean oozing care everywhere until you’re completely depleted.

Yeah.

Because that’s how burnout happens.

Yeah. It doesn’t. It doesn’t.

I also have to say that that’s a very good point. I didn’t do it alone. And you don’t have to do it alone.

And like the practical advice that you gave to make sure you are taking care of financially in any way, like whether that means like knowing what you would or would not be responsible for, legally, financially, whatever those things are, those are

conversations that you need to have with each other. Those are things that you, conversations that you need to have with professionals as well.

You know, I’m, I, and again, I would say that to somebody, whether or not you are with somebody who is facing a terminal diagnosis. And practically speaking, I leaned on a lot of people.

Like God bless my older sister, who I basically made like the captain. When people would reach out to me and say like, what can I do to help? I would say, that’s such a good question for my sister who made a spreadsheet.

She made a spreadsheet for me. So people who wanted to help drive him to appointments. Radiation was every day for 30 days.

And it was always like at like the most random time. I couldn’t take him every day. God bless America.

So who could sign up to take him to and from radiation? And then like, you know, follow it up with some lunch or start with a brunch, then go to radiation because he might not feel good afterwards.

Again, I don’t know what her partner has right now, could be brain cancer, could be a number of other horrible diseases that give you about three years to live, but enlist the people who want to put that comfort in.

Look to your outer circles and say, who wants to bring some comfort in? Who wants to rally around us? It’s not just, let me know if I can do anything, it’s here’s something that I will do.

And you should be reaching out to the people who love you, who love this man, who want to support you and say, like, here’s 10 things that I need right now. And who’s gonna sign up to do them?

And take every bit of help that you can with literally no shame, because people want to show up. They want to do something, let them help, it will help you and it will also help them. They get to feel good about themselves.

Take all the help that you can get. But again, you do not have to do all of it. You don’t have to do all of it.

This does not all fall on you. And Tracy is going to co-sign this sentiment. You’re not a bad person for wondering if this is what you should be doing with your life at age 33.

You’re not, you’re not a bad person for wanting to push an escape hatch that just boops you out of your little spaceship and into the ether. You’re not, like most people don’t love to sit in suffering. Most people are looking for an escape hatch.

And for some people that is, leaving the relationship and for other people, that’s substances. So keep an eye on that too, babe. That’s what I said, you know?

And fair, it is.

And nutrition and hydration and sleep, all of those things that go out the window when we’re in crisis. Yeah.

And you’re in a crisis.

All of those things that I was terrible at.

Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

So like, I don’t know, it is a lot. You’re not a bad person. We can’t tell you what to do, but we did just tell you some things that you have to do.

I don’t know.

I thought of one more thing in guilt.

Mm.

So, and I think about this a lot because in my practice, I like to think about what emotions are telling us, right?

We sit with them and we figure it out and we feel it in our body, and then maybe we have some thoughts that come in and they’re negative towards ourselves. Guilt is generally, guilt is when something is not in alignment with your values.

Mm.

And in this case, she valued being a parent. Parenting was a core value, and she values her relationship. So she’s in alignment with her values even though they’re conflicting.

So it’s not guilt, it’s the inability to take on somebody else’s pain. It’s… When we can’t take…

And we’re raised this way, a lot of women, right, are raised to take on all the emotions of other people. And when we can’t do that, we mistake it with guilt.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I just think guilt shouldn’t exist. I mean, unless you’re a really bad person. You’re actually a bad, like…

And if you’re actually a psychopath, then feel guilty about, you know, the murders and the bad things that you’ve done. But don’t feel bad about having needs.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And women are conditioned to be needless and selfless. And you know who ends up leaving sick people?

Men.

Men.

Men, statistically speaking. Hold on. I looked it up.

What is it? Seriously? It is…

It is… Here it is. What is it?

Mm-mm-mm. Researchers found that women faced a divorce or separation rate of 20.8% when they were sick compared to 2.9% when men were sick.

Mm.

So I’m pretty sure the math is that men are 10 times more likely to leave a woman when she’s sick than a woman is to leave a man. I might have been doing that math. I can’t really do math.

It’s whatever.

You’re more likely, okay?

It’s girl math, but yeah.

Yeah.

You’re more likely.

Yeah.

Do you think they feel guilty?

Probably not.

I think they’re married to someone half their age within six weeks.

Because they’re looking for someone to take care of them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s just hard. I know that it’s hard to live knowing that you’re not going to get what you want. Like at least not in the way that you imagined you would.

All right, guys, it’s time for feedback loop. This is a segment where we take, You Got It, Your Feedback, feedback about other episodes. We’re not taking them from the podcast reviews.

I would never read those. That is a form of self-harm to me. Of course, I would only read the bad ones, but not anymore.

And I’m a mentally healthy person, asterisk mostly. So I don’t do that. So I will read your emails.

I will take your voicemails, even your text messages. This is feedback that we got on an episode that we did with a woman who sent in a voicemail asking if anybody else could relate to her Gen X marriage.

As a little refresher, this is what she had to say to us.

Hi, Nora. Oh, I guess I really do need to talk about this. It’s bothered me more than I thought.

I’m a 56-year-old woman whose body is a little bit out of control from the menopause, but, you know, overall, I’m healthy and I’m smart and I’m a little lumpy, but I got sass, but I feel invisible. Nobody looks at me.

And while I can accept being ignored by the bartender and the stock boy and the cashier and the flight attendant, it’s just killing me that my husband does too. We’ve been married for 14 years. It’s my second marriage.

And I really thought that at age 42, like I had my shit together and I picked the right guy. I have two children from my first marriage. And while I only one is still living, I’ve done the work to integrate the ache of losing a kid into my life.

And, you know, my daughter recently had a baby, and she and my son-in-law and my grandson are just the right of my life. And I babysit four days a week, and it’s the best.

But, you know, when I come home, there’s no romance, no kind gestures, no sex, no conversation. We’re very polite roommates, you know, two people with separate lives who happen to live at the same address.

And I just want to know, is this just what happens in your 50s? Like, are all the other Gen-Xers living in this weird predatory where you’re neither married nor single?

Where you still make them a lunch for work, but he doesn’t notice when you’re naked? Where you watch TV together? And very companionable silence, but you don’t talk about your favorite parts of the movie or what character you think you’d be.

I just, that’s why I just need the 50-somethings to call in, you know, and just let me know, is this how everyone is living? Because I just think maybe I could accept it better if I knew that I wasn’t alone.

So.

We got a lot of feedback on this episode. A lot of you wanted to weigh in on this. And here are some of your voicemails.

Hi, this is Tiffany.

I’m a Gen Xer and I am calling about your conversation with a lovely Gen X lady who feels like her husband is a roommate. And I want to say, as a 51-year-old woman, post-hysterectomy, in a second relationship, that my sex life is better than ever.

A, I don’t have to worry about getting pregnant. So, boo-yah is great. My partner and I did something that I think has made our relationship super special.

We implemented something called Sexy Sundays. Two Sundays a month, we have no children in the house. They are with their dad and it is our day.

And we do not plan anything. We plan to stay in bed, watch movies, snuggle, cuddle. We have sex and it’s nice because nothing is rushing us.

He makes me a chai latte. And we just, it’s kind of a throwaway day where we don’t worry about anything other than each other. And it has been the absolute best thing we have done for our relationship.

We’ve been through a lot of tough things. We’ve been through cancer. We are both business owners.

We have kid in college, kid in high school. Like life is busy and crazy and insane. And implementing these sexy Sundays in our 50s has kept things crazy, spicy and wonderful.

Hi.

Hi. Yes. I am a 50…

How old am I? 50… No, 53.

Anyway, 50-something, Jen Xer, I have been in a relationship for 15 years with a partner, and we are currently having this discussion. We had a big blow up fight earlier this week that I felt invisible.

And we actually just got out of a full sit-down conversation at the table on how to deal with it. And yes, yes, yes, this is a thing. And yeah, and then I sat down at my phone machine to listen to a podcast, and here you are.

Yes, yes, this is very much a thing. Okay, bye. Hi, I’m calling, I’m a GenXer, and I’m calling about the episode on what’s marriage like when you get in your fifties.

I don’t have what the cover had. Actually, I have the complete opposite. It’s the best it’s ever been.

My partner and I are the exact same age, he’s six months older, I was telling him that. He’s the older one. But we are having the best sex of our lives.

We’re closer than we’ve ever been. Partially, he’s been able to cut back on his work. That’s helped his stress level, so he’s happier.

We don’t see each other all the time, but when we do see each other, we just have a really good time. We talk about it. I was with some girlfriends this weekend, and one girlfriend said that she hadn’t had sex since 2015.

I almost had a heart attack hearing that, and I talked to my partner about it. We were just flabbergasted because we had a three-day weekend. We had sex every day.

I don’t know. I know I’m not the norm, but I’m lucky, but my GenX experience is really, really great.

And I think it’s just that we’ve hit the age where all the dumb stuff doesn’t matter, all the little things, and we’re just happy that we get along and we have the same ideas, and we both want to have sex until we can’t have it anymore.

We’ll use all the assistive equipment, whether it be pillows, a lift, whatever. We’re going to have it as long as possible. But this GenX experience is not what your callers say, so I just wanted to share that.

Thank you. Hi. I’m calling about the GenX thing.

I just left a previous message, and I forgot to say one thing.

I’ve come to the realization when I was younger, and we would find in the town where I lived in, they had a paper with a single thing, and they always had ads for swingers, and it always seemed like the swingers were always 50 and above.

I realized why that happened is once you hit 50, it’s like your give-a-shit meter changes. You don’t give a shit anymore. It’s like I spent my whole life worrying about like, oh, God, is my stomach too big?

Is this, what will people think about me if I’m this freaky or whatever? I’m not a swinger, but I’ll just say, I think that’s the mindset is that when you get to a certain age, you’re like, I’m this age, I’m going to quit worrying about stupid stuff.

I think that’s why swingers are all, a lot of swingers are in their 50s and above because they’re like, I’ve been thinking about this my whole life, and I’m finally just going to do it because I don’t care what the people I went to high school think

or the people that I work with or the people at my church. I don’t care anymore. And I think that’s a little bit of what’s going on in my relationship is that we just don’t care what other people think.

And we also never want to go through dating again or do any of that stuff. We’ve hit a good spot. We like each other and what we’ve got has such a good base.

We just want to make it better. But I do think that when you hit 50, it seems like 50 to me because it was that for me. Once I hit 50, I just didn’t care anymore.

I just let myself be myself. And my partner and I did go through some troubles and stuff, but I just decided to be completely honest and be like, hey, I can’t deal with this.

I want to be with you, but if this is going to keep happening, we’re going to have to work something else out. And so I think honesty, which you mentioned in the show, and everything is important too.

But yeah, I think when you hit a certain age, you just don’t care anymore.

Oh man, so that was quite an episode. That was quite a journey. That was quite a question.

So thank you so much to our caller for being brave enough to write in, being brave enough to share those feelings, those questions, and being honestly brave enough to confront that question with yourself, and then to share it with all of us.

I want to reiterate a few of the things that Tracy said that I think are so valuable, and things that I wish that I would have thought about when I was in your shoes.

It’s interesting to me that we recorded this episode on Halloween, October 31st, 2025, because on October 31st, 2011, I was in this caller’s shoes.

I was finding out that the man that I loved, a man that I had waited all 27 years of my life for, had a brain tumor.

And I would find out in the days to come that his life would be abbreviated, that we had maybe three to five years, turned out to be three almost to the day. Just kind of an interesting thing, right? When stuff aligns that way.

I booked this recording on this day. I didn’t really put it together until this exact moment, but the choice is not between selfishness and selflessness. This does not all fall on you.

Loving somebody is a responsibility. Loving somebody is a privilege, and you don’t have to abandon yourself in the process.

So I do want you to have a support system, whatever road you choose, whether you choose the exit ramp, whether you walk away from this relationship or whether you stay, it cannot, should not, will not all fall on your shoulders.

You have to look out for yourself. You have to look out for yourself financially. You have to look out for yourself legally.

These are conversations that, yes, you have to have with him, and yes, you have to have with some professionals as well. And by the way, this is advice that I would give to you, whether or not the love of your life had a terminal diagnosis.

You’ve got to look out for yourself. You’ve got to know what the laws are, where you live. You have to know what you will be responsible for, and you have to have a support system for yourself and for him that goes beyond just the two of you.

So thank you for sharing that. Good luck. I hope this was helpful.

I hope it was helpful. I hope it was helpful. And I hope it was helpful for everybody listening, too, to kind of watch how perspective can shift.

You know, I would have come into this pretty hot. I would have come into this pretty hot had I recorded my first reaction to it, which would have been like, what do you mean? You just got to take care of people.

That’s what you got to do, right?

You got to do.

That’s why I wanted to talk to Tracy. I wanted to talk to somebody else who had been through it, who had also not gotten, you know, the life that they wanted with the person that they wanted it with.

And even talking it through with Tracy, I saw things that I missed in, you know, even the response that I recorded, okay? Everything offers you perspective. Your perspective can shift.

It can expand. And I really do want to be a person who is gentle with other people and gentle with myself, because often when I am being harsh and judgmental to other people, that is because that is exactly how I am with myself as well.

And as Tracy pointed out, this caller is a woman who understands that she has needs and knows what those needs are. And that’s a really wonderful thing. And that’s what I want to encourage in people, truly.

Thank you all for being here. This is the end of our episode. I’m going to read out the names of all of our supporting producers.

If you have been here for a minute, you know that our supporting producers are people who get their name read in the credits because they belong to our Substack, not at the monthly level, not at the annual level, but at a different level.

They said, well, I’ll kick in a little more, I’ll get my name in the credits. First people get their name in the credits are Marcel Melikibu and Grace Berry, who produce this stuff. Second, Geoffrey Lamar Wilson, who made our opening theme music.

Third is my young son Q, who made the theme music that you’re hearing right now, but the supporting producers, that’s Joy Heising, KM., Nancy Duff, Jenny Medellin, Jordan Jones, Sheila Kathleen Langerman, Ben, Jess, Michelle Toms, Tom Stockburger,

Jen, Beth Derry, Stacey Tomorrow, Emily Ferriso, Stephanie Johnson, Faye Behrens, Amanda, Sarah Garifo, Jennifer McDagle, all caps, Elia Phillies-Millan, Lindsay Lund, Renee Kepke, Chelsea Cernick, Car Pan, Al GS., Stacey Wilson, Courtney McCown,

Kaylee Sakai, Mary Beth Berry, my high school gym teacher, Jothia Disopolis, Mad, Abbi Arose, Elizabeth Berkley, Kim F. Melody Swinford, Thal, Lauren Hanna, Katie, Jessica LaTexier, Crystal Man, Lisa Piven, Kate Lyon, Christina, Sarah David, Kate

Byerjohn, Aaron John, Joy Pollock, Crystal, Jennifer Pavelka, Jess Blackwell, Micah, Jessica Reed, Beth Lippem, Kiara, Joe McDonald, Jen Grimlin, Alexis Lane, David Vinkley, Kathy Hamm, Virginia Labassi, Lizzie DeVries, Jeremy Essin, Ann